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Canon Pixma MG5420 on Linux Mint

Another round with this new platform. My mom uses a desktop computer with a Canon Pixma printer/scanner, and I wanted to get this to work. I found a thread on askubuntu which referred me to the cannon europe site. There I downloaded the debian package listed as MG5400 series IJ Printer Driver Ver. 3.80 for Linux (debian Packagearchive). I untar’d and cd’d into the directory, but when attempting to run ./install.sh, I got the error:

This is a problem with the old canon drivers looking for an old libtiff. Mint has libtiff5, but no libtiff4 in its repositories. I was able to grab a libtiff4 deb archive from the debian repos. I’m using an amd64 processor as most people so in my case I needed libtiff4_3.9.6-11_amd64.deb. After getting that and running sudo dpkg -i ../libtiff4_3.9.6-11_amd64.deb I was able to continue by running the canon ./install.sh normally.

Getting the scanner to work was a little surprising. It doesn’t work with xsane or simple-scan, but when I got MG5400 series ScanGear MP Ver. 2.00 for Linux (debian Packagearchive) from that same canon-europe site, it worked. Again, I got the tarball, unpacked it, ran the ./install.sh (this time without a problem). From there I had to run the command scangearmp in the shell, which opened up the program and let me start scanning images. As I said, I wanted my mom to be able to use this, so I created a desktop launcher to start it (and used /usr/share/icons/Mint-X/devices/48/scanner.png for the icon).